My humble advice for anyone looking to recover from alcoholism the AA way

For anyone looking to recover from alcoholism the AA way.

 In my humble experience it's a very good idea to read (even better to study) the AA book Alcoholics Anonymous and also go to meetings for any alcoholic looking to get recovery from the fatal illness. My advice is to stick with official AA literature. It is time tested and works. There are many authors seeking to profit from publishing their own recovery books that, in my experience, are a distortion of the true program outlined in the good old AA basic texts.

  Some meetings have many people with good intentions but alot of them don't take the time to really study the literature of the fellowship - the book "Alcoholics Anonymous" and the book "Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions".

  The best thing that ever happened to me is the day I stumbled upon a man who was in a meeting of AA when I was floundering in recovery. I was not drinking but not very happy and still creating some wreckage and making life a bit difficult for some people. I was still practicing some character defects - being selfish.

At the time I had no sponsor so I asked this fellow in that meeting to sponsor me. I liked him. His sharing was no nonsense and was different than the usual. He bought me a a large text AA book and told me that if I wanted his help that we were going to study it. I was confused at first. I said "hey Greg, I can see fine, I don't need a large text book. I already have an AA book. He told me. I didn't buy you this book because your sight is bad, it's because you are gonna write in the margins when we study it. So, that's what we did weekly for about 6 months. It was a huge turning point in my life; all for the better. In that time I found out something kind of embarrassing. I had been going to AA meetings and had four sponsors and didn't really know the AA program up to that point. Now I feel I have a pretty good understanding and have been much more effective at sponsorship. In fact I never did have any success at sponsorship until after studying the AA book.